John Engates was having dinner with IT executives from the celebrity news and gossip site TMZ.com when the news of Steve Jobs' passing hit the wires. At that point one might imagine the group heading for the exits while pounding on their Blackberry smart phones, issuing an all-hands-on-deck in anticipation of the traffic tsumami that was about to wash over their site.

Instead, one of the executives calmly pulled out an iPad, launched a montoring app and proceeded to show Engates, the CTO of Rackspace, how the news was driving traffic out of sight on TMZ.com -- and how the site was scaling to that meet demand without missing a beat. They weren't worried about capacity: It wasn't their problem.

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This story, "What CIOs don't know about cloud" was originally published by
Computerworld.